The Hydrogen Sonata

window. The noise reduced a little. Then he got up and went to the side of the window, swinging in a heavy, wooden, two-part shutter. Tefwe did the same at the other side. The cell was almost completely dark now; her eyes were working mostly on infra-red. The Sound was reduced less than the light. It was still there, especially the deepest, most resonant and longest notes, but when QiRia put a thick wooden bolt across between the two shutters to secure them, she heard the clunk it made. It was, she realised, the first thing she’d heard that wasn’t the Sound in quite a long time. Her ears relaxed a little.

QiRia had sat down in his crude-looking seat again. She sat by the low wall in front of him, under the shutters. At first she thought he wasn’t going to look at her, seemingly gazing over her head as though still staring out towards the mountain, then he lowered his head.

“So, Tefwe,” he began, speaking Marain, his voice little more than a croak. He coughed, cleared his throat, started again, voice louder and assured. “So, Tefwe, let me guess. You just happened to be in the neighbourhood.”

“Hello, Ngaroe. It’s good to see you again. How are you?”

“I’m well.” He smiled. It was hard for her to read his expression behind the slatted glasses, but she reckoned it was a genuine smile. “You?”

“Also well, though it’s complicated.” She looked around the bare little cell. “What is it that you do here, Ngaroe?”

His eyebrows went up a little at this. “Isn’t it obvious?” he asked mildly. “I listen.”

“You listen?”

“Yes. That’s… that’s all I do. I sit here and… well,” he said, smiling — this was, Tefwe was already thinking, the most smiley and un-prickly she could remember seeing the man — “calling it ‘listening’ doesn’t really do it justice. I sit here and… absorb the Sound. It becomes part of me, I become part of it. It is… magisterial, bliss- making, overwhelming. I am… transported by it, Tefwe. Here, the locals treat it as a religious experience. I don’t, of course, but I’d still claim it is as important to me as it is to them. As… profound.” He gave a small laugh. “You’re lucky, you know. It comes and goes. Right now I am like a sleeper near the shallowest part of a sleep-cycle, so I can come out of the trance of listening and talk to you. I… I almost welcome the break. A week from now, though, and I’d refuse even to talk to anybody, no matter who they might be, how far they’d come or how urgently they needed to see me, and in two weeks I would be so far under I’d be incapable even of acknowledging the presence of one of the helpers come to tell me I had a visitor. That’s when they have to feed me water with a sponge and try to get me to swallow crumbs of cake.” He smiled his beatific smile again. “But you said that ‘it’ — that is, how you are — was complicated. In what way?”

“It’s complicated because in a sense I’m not really here, Ngaroe,” she told him. “I’m still Stored — technically, basically — on a ship called the You Call This Clean? a long, long way from here. What you see in front of you is a copy; I feel entirely like me inside here, but the truth is I’m embodied inside a ship’s blank-body, appropriately customised.”

“Hmm. So, let me see, I think only Hassipura knew where I’d hidden myself this time. Have you been to see it?”

“Yes. It still builds sandstream complexes on a life-forsaken plain in the middle of nowhere on an O called Dibaldipen; the kind of barren wasteland on an Orbital that designers pretend they meant to happen all the time but which is really the result of over-artistic weather-pattern modelling and which secretly they are thoroughly ashamed of and embarrassed by.” She paused. “Though I was in yet another copied body then, still it feels exactly as though that was me, riding out across the desert to talk to the recalcitrant machine. It, ah, it sends its regards, by the way.” She shrugged. “It was being sincere and un-ironic, as far as I could tell.”

QiRia smiled. “Yes, I visited it there,” he told her. “Honn, Dibaldipen. Dusty… Anyway. What has caused this proliferation of Tefwes, Tefwe?” he asked.

“Oh, there’s a flap going on. They need me to ask you something.”

“Who’s ‘they’?”

“A fairly standard ship collective handling the latest budding emergency.”

“SC?”

“No. Though some SC-associated ships helped get me to Hassipura and now to you.”

“Should I be worried or flattered?”

“Flattered.”

“Hassipura told you where I was… willingly?”

“Yes.”

“How easy was it to convince it?”

“It took time, but that was mostly just showing it the respect it believes it’s due. That drone demands a certain ceremoniality in such matters.”

QiRia smiled again, nodded. “And you left it well, functioning?”

“Entirely. Anyway, it still has surprisingly many ambitions in regard to its desiccated hobby.”

“So, what is it you want of me?”

“We need you to confirm or deny something. It will take a little while to explain.”

“I have the time. Do you?”

“Of course. It’s about the Gzilt.”

“Ah-ha!”

“They’re about to Sublime.”

“I know. I trust that all goes smoothly.”

“Ah, well,” she said, and told him all she had been told.

He sat forward, listening, nodding now and again.

“So,” Tefwe said, “the Z-R seem to think you might be able to confirm what the message from the Zihdren themselves is claiming: that the Book of Truth is a lie, part of somebody’s experiment in applied practical theology or something. And we — the Culture — have been asked to help the Z-R with this, plus we have a kind of obligation to the Gzilt to do the right thing.”

“But how much difference might it make?” QiRia asked, sounding sad. “Knowing the truth of it, if it is true?”

Tefwe shrugged. “I don’t know, Ngaroe. I’m not sure anybody knows. But we can’t just let it go. I guess the truth always needs to be chased down. I’m helping with the chasing, and you have the answer, or part of it. If you remember. Do you remember?”

He just sat there smiling at her, silent. The Sound, outside, a vast shadowy symphony of meaninglessness, still seemed to fill the small, night-dark cell.

Her throat was a little sore, she realised, from having to keep her voice raised for so long. She cleared it, said, “I remember that you told me you forgot nothing, remembered everything, had it all stored within you, sometimes multiply, in exhaustive, awful, boring, terrible detail. Detail ghastly for its sheer everlasting banality.” She paused to give him time to speak, but still he didn’t. “It would be good to know what you know about all this, Ngaroe. You always seemed to feel something for the Gzilt. It might help them to know whether this is the truth at last, or another lie.” She paused again, but still he kept silent. “Even if we find out something that it might be best for them not to know, at least we’ll know. At least we’ll have the choice.”

“But who would we be to make that choice?”

“Their friends.”

“Really?”

“The Culture has no selfish interests in this, Ngaroe,” she said, trying not to sigh, though doubting that he’d hear her if she did. She could sense that they were already starting to gravitate back to some of the arguments they’d had centuries ago. They had ended inconclusively then — unless you counted mutual annoyance as a conclusion — and she thought it highly unlikely they’d end up any different this time.

He looked unconvinced, eyebrows rising again. “The Culture has an interest in everything it touches,” he said. “I thought we’d agreed that at least.”

“Maybe so, but no selfish interest. We just want to do the right thing by people we’ve historically felt close to.”

“Ah. That old excuse.”

“Will you stop that?” She could feel herself starting to get angry with him again, and that was not going to